


swing from the chandelier

by dorothymcshane



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, F/M, Falling In Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-20
Updated: 2015-05-16
Packaged: 2018-03-24 22:56:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3787441
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dorothymcshane/pseuds/dorothymcshane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She’ll take him as her date to the premieres of her movies and they’ll steal kisses from each other among the midnight flowers in his garden, but don’t ask them if they’re in love, they will deny it.</p><p>(Nothing lasts forever.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

It’s raining, the first time they meet. The rain falls over the university campus, drops of water sticking to the grass, making the lawns glitter. Clara’s hurrying towards the arts building, trying to protect her hair from the rain by holding her jacket over her head.

   It’s been four years since she last set foot on the campus. Four years since she graduated with an honours degree in drama. It feels like a lifetime ago.

   Today, she’s there to hold an inspiring speech to the drama students at the school, about what their degrees could lead to in the future. Clara can’t shake the feeling of that she will be lying to them. Because while it is true that she’s been successful, ridiculously so, most of her old classmates have either given up on trying to achieve their acting dreams or live on the edge of poverty while auditioning for roles as extras in television series. There is a reason behind why it is _her_ that the university has invited back.

   A couple of people stop her on the way to ask her about her autograph and selfies with her, and she complies, scribbling crooked letters onto the pieces of paper that they reach her and smiling at their phone cameras.

   Behind the façade she puts up for them, she’s freezing, she’s tired and she just wants to get the day over with.

   The arts building is as impressive as she remembers it as, reminds her of old castles with its towers and turrets. Inside the lobby, the sound of the students’ chatter and laughter echoes between the walls, and if Clara closes her eyes, she can almost imagine being one of them again, twenty years old with her arms full of books and her head full of dreams.

   “Clara Oswald,” an older man greets her when she reaches the auditorium. He crosses the floor of the room to shake one of her hands, but his grasp is so light that it mostly feels like he’s brushing his fingertips against hers. He’s dressed in a black jumper with holes in it under a black coat with red linings, his grey locks just a little too long and a little too dishevelled. She doesn’t recognise him.

   “I thought Nyssa was going to ...”

   The man shrugs. “She’s fallen ill with a stomach flu.” His voice is raspy, his accent Scottish. “She asked me to take care of you instead, so here I am. Terrible weather, isn’t it?”

   “Terrible weather,” Clara agrees, casting a glance towards the windows of the auditorium. The world outside is grey, the view of the city blurred by the rain. The silence inside the room begs to be broken. “So, who exactly are you?”

   “John Smith’s the name, but most people just call me the Doctor.” A second passes before he opens his mouth again, looking down at his feet. “I teach art history.”

   In the future, Clara will lie in his bed with his arms around her, her cheeks flushed, the skin on her neck still tingling after he’s left feathery kisses across it. Her heart will beat fast, and she will whisper three words into the darkness of the room.

   Now, she simply nods, and they exchange a few awkward sentences about her own time at the university before students start pouring into the auditorium. When the Doctor presents her to them, the room drowns in applause, and if Clara closes her eyes, she can almost imagine being one of them again, twenty years old with hopes of that one day, she will be the one standing in front of them.

 

**

 

Maybe Clara should be used to the attention by now, but she doesn’t think it’s something you can get used to, not really. So after she’s finished the speech – only messing up a couple of her prepared lines, but laughing a little too much, a little too nervously – she asks the Doctor to take her somewhere private for lunch, instead of to the dining hall, where it would be impossible for her to avoid curious looks.

   He regards her quietly for a few seconds in that intense way of his. Then he nods, and they end up in his car, the rain pattering against its roof, the car radio playing punk songs from the seventies. Clara doesn’t ask him about where he’s taking her, and she knows she’s being irresponsible, but there’s something about him, something that makes her trust him.

   He lives in a little house outside of the city, with floor-to-ceiling windows and a well-kept garden full of blossoming flowers. It’s April and you can feel the spring in the air.

   The Doctor cooks Clara coconut curry with vegetables while she annoys him with questions about the pieces of art that cover the walls of his house, all painted by him. He asks her about her favourite food, and she mumbles something about soufflés.

   “So, you’re an actress,” he says, when they’ve sat down opposite each other at the table, with plates of curry and glasses of red wine in front of them.

   Clara grimaces. “Yeah, I don’t really know how that happened.”

   “Talent,” the Doctor suggests, sipping his wine.

   “Luck,” Clara objects.

   “Are you filming anything right now?”

   “No, I’m in between two projects.” She’s just finished filming a dreadfully clichéd romantic comedy and is looking forward to travelling to Los Angeles to get started on a science fiction movie in which she plays the villain. “I’m mostly doing promo right now, interviews and photo shoots and charity events and everything my agent thinks I should do to keep my name in the papers. Have you watched any of my films?”

   “No,” he says, making her smile, “I’m boring, I tend to keep to books.”

   “I don’t think you’re boring.”

   He watches her with his grey blue eyes, the colour of the sea just before a storm breaks out. “You don’t know me,” he says, at last, when Clara’s very nearly given up hope of that he will ever open his mouth again.

   “Maybe I’d like to,” she says.

 

**

 

She ends up staying there for hours, while the world outside slowly is swallowed by darkness. The midnight flowers in the Doctor’s garden bloom, and he finds a flashlight in a kitchen cupboard, aiming its light at the flowers. They’re beautiful, making the dead of night come alive, but Clara’s gaze keeps drifting towards him.

   “Are you even looking?” the Doctor asks her, lowering the flashlight.

   She shakes her head and turns around to face him, reaching up on her tiptoes to tangle her hands into his hair and kiss him. When they break apart from each other, Clara’s pretty sure neither one of them is breathing.

   “Clara, what ...” the Doctor begins, but she hushes him, slowly unbuttoning her dress, letting it fall to the muddy ground. Her pale skin shines in the moonlight.

   When they wake up the next morning, it’s as a tangled mess of limbs, Clara’s arms around his chest, his legs intertwined with hers. She strokes a finger across his collar bones, and their eyes meet, a thousand questions hidden in them, a thousand questions that neither one of them will ever have the courage to ask out loud.

   Two weeks pass in a blur of breakfasts eaten in bed, hours spent in the garden while the Doctor tells Clara about the different flowers, shared cups of coffee while the Doctor drives Clara to the places she needs to be, kisses that are too slow and too desperate all at once.

   Clara’s never been in love. There’s something about the mere word that terrifies her. She sleeps with people and then moves on, without ever letting anyone linger on her mind, let alone in her heart.

   In the future, she will admit that she is in love with the Doctor, and a piece of her heart will never be hers again.

   She travels to Los Angeles, reading and re-reading a poetry book that the Doctor has given her while she soaks in the sun. She sends him messages about everything from how greasy the food on the set is to how the director of the movie is constantly flirting with her. He answers them with inappropriate emojis and claims that he doesn’t understand technology when Clara asks him about it, one of the many nights they spend talking to each other. If Clara closes her eyes, she can almost imagine that he’s lying next to her, but he’s on the other side of the world, and she misses him terribly.

   When it’s time for the premiere of the romantic comedy, Clara sends him a plane ticket. He turns up at the door to her flat the evening before, dressed in a polka dot shirt under his magician coat, the scent of aftershave and his perfume lingering in the air around him, and she throws her arms around him, blinking away tears.

   “Is he your boyfriend?” a journalist asks when they appear together on the red carpet. Clara and the Doctor simultaneously shake their heads, but as soon as they return to Clara’s flat after the premiere, both of them drunk on cocktails and the magic of it all, they make sweet love on the hallway floor.

   In the future, Clara will fall asleep with tears burning in her eyes, telling herself that _nothing lasts forever nothing lasts forever nothing lasts forever_ over and over again until the words blur together in her head.


	2. Chapter 2

It will rain, the last time they see each other. Clara will have tears in her eyes and the Doctor will have tears in his eyes and Clara will linger with her hand on the Doctor’s cheek for a moment too long and he will whisper that she will miss her flight if she doesn’t go and she will whisper that maybe she doesn’t care. Their last kiss will be bittersweet and taste of raindrops and salt tears and they won’t know, they will not know that it’s the last time, and Clara will later wonder whether that was a blessing or a curse.

 

**

 

The Doctor stays in Los Angeles while Clara finishes shooting the science fiction movie. She steals kisses from him between the takes, sits on his lap dressed in her leather attire, her face covered in thick layers of makeup that her makeup artist blames her for ruining. She never explains who he is to anyone, but the director stops flirting with her the same day the Doctor sets foot on the set for the first time, because even though they won’t admit they’re in love, everybody knows it.

   They spend their nights taking long walks among the glittering skyscrapers in the city, drinking champagne that tastes like the stars that are nowhere to be seen and ordering food to eat on the balcony of Clara’s flat in the lovely summer air, getting lost in their own little world and whispering reasons why they shouldn’t ever get up from bed again to each other.

   The night before their bubble breaks and the Doctor has to go back home to England while Clara has three weeks of press and auditions waiting for her, she leaves love bites all over his neck and a couple by his hip bones, and then she kisses his lips and doesn’t tell him goodbye, because goodbye is something you say when you don’t know if you’re going to see each other again.

   As long as Clara doesn’t tell him goodbye, they will last forever, their lives hopelessly intertwined with other, their love burning brighter than all of the dazzling neon lights lighting up the dark city around them.

 

**

 

Three weeks is a blink of the eye and an eternity, and Clara misses the Doctor terribly, but she survives, and he survives, and here they are, standing in the arrivals gate at Heathrow, while time has stopped around them.

   “Three months,” Clara tells him that evening when they’re lying on his lawn, their bodies stained with grass and mud, the midnight flowers blooming around them and the sky above them filled with stars. “I don’t have to go anywhere in three months. I want to move in. Can I move in?”

   A smile tugs at the corners of his mouth. “Do.”

   And so she does.

 

**

 

If Clara’s life were a fairy tale, she and the Doctor would live happily ever after together.

   She thinks about this, the first and only time they fight, shouting at each other about something irrelevant. He calls her childish in a tone that makes the blood in her veins freeze to ice, and she calls him old and bitter, smiling cruelly at how it makes him wince.

   “And anyway,” she continues when he doesn’t say anything, “I fucking hate your garden and your obsession with your stupid midnight flowers.”

   “Then why don’t you go back to Los Angeles and shag that director instead of me?” the Doctor bites back before leaving the room.

   It takes two days before they apologise and finally can bear to look each other in the eyes again. Forty-eight wasted hours that will haunt Clara when he’s buried six feet underground, his eyes shut, his cold body slowly withering away in the frozen soil. Forty-eight wasted hours that will haunt Clara when she kneels in front of his gravestone with midnight flowers from his garden in her arms, desperately hoping he knew that she didn’t mean it when she told him that she hated his garden.

 

**

 

“And what about love?” an interviewer asks Clara with a wink. “Is there a special someone in your life?”

   She can feel drops of sweat breaking out on her skin. “Well, I’m sure you know about the rumours.”

   The interviewer looks delighted. “So they’re true?”

   “I’m neither confirming nor denying anything,” Clara finally says, after a second too many, and as soon as the interview’s aired, so many people are calling and messaging Clara that she has to turn off her phone.

   Instead, she curls up in the Doctor’s arms and lets him hold her throughout the night, falling asleep to the sound of his heartbeats.

 

**

 

The last week, they drink coffee together at small cafés in forgotten alleyways of London, take a day trip down to the sea and talk about the future while cuddled up in the Doctor’s bed.

   Clara lies on the floor of the Doctor’s house and watches him while he paints. The Doctor sits in the garden and watches Clara while she paces back and forth and rehearses her lines.

   Clara admits that she is in love with the Doctor, and a piece of her heart is never hers again.

 

**

 

“I want an enormous wedding,” Clara proclaims, “with hundreds of guests and flowers everywhere and a wedding dress so beautiful that no one can tear their eyes away from me.”

   “As you wish, as you wish,” the Doctor mumbles, absentmindedly interlacing his fingers with hers. “What about our honeymoon? Can I decide where we’ll go?”

   Clara smiles. “Suggestions are welcome.”

   “Italy?”

   “We could go there anytime, and yet you want us to spend our honeymoon there?”

   The Doctor shrugs.

   “Okay,” Clara says, “if you want to spend it in Italy, I’m not going to argue with you, as long as you let me plan the wedding.”

   “You’re already planning the wedding, dear,” he reminds her.

   She rolls around to face him and brushes her lips softly against his before breaking away from the kiss and looking him in the eyes. “Can I ask you something?”

   “Go on.”

   “Do you want children?”

   “Do you?”

   She hesitates for a second. “Maybe.”

   The Doctor seems to understand her fear in admitting it to him. “Clara, it’s okay, you’re allowed to want to have children.”

   “And I understand it if you feel like you’re too old for them.”

   “Let me think about it, okay?”

   She nods and then buries her face against the crook of his neck while he wraps his arms tighter around her.

                                                            

**

 

It takes six words to ruin a universe. Six words, a thousand sorrys, and eighty-six thousand four hundred seconds that Clara never wants to relive even in her wildest nightmares.

 

**

 

Clara isn’t in England the day of his funeral. She’s stuck in a meeting about the sequel to the science fiction movie with the director. Half-way through the meeting, she snaps at him and storms out of the room. He finds her outside of his office, her coffee spilt all over the floor, her cheeks stained with tears and her legs too weak to carry her. She asks him if he’s ever been in love. He tells her yes. She lets him take her to his flat and lets him fuck her, roughly, painfully, brutally, until she can’t feel anything at all. At least, that’s what she tells herself, but it still hurts,  _it still fucking hurts_ , and she missed the funeral.

 

**

 

Clara stays in Los Angeles for half a year, ignoring the plane ticket in her wallet. When she isn’t shooting, she keeps herself busy by letting her agent schedule her for dozens of appearances and interviews, goes to nightclubs and private parties every night, drowning herself in work and glitter, and blames her unwillingness to visit England on her lack of spare time.

   Then, she needs to be in London for a premiere, and somehow, she finds herself standing in the Doctor’s garden, overgrown and withering away around her, and she falls apart.

   She doesn’t realise that it’s gotten dark around her until the midnight flowers start blooming.

 

**

 

Before the premiere, she visits his grave, leaving all the midnight flowers from his garden by the gravestone, and then she smiles for the cameras, she smiles and she smiles and she smiles, and all the while, her heart is breaking into a thousand pieces, shattering all over the red carpet, the blood soaked fragments glistening under the bright lights.

   “You’re boyfriend’s not here?” somebody asks her, and drunk on cocktails and sadness, Clara tells them that they’re currently on their honeymoon in Italy and that she’s just back for the premiere. The person will only have to read a magazine to find out that Clara’s lying, but it makes Clara smile for a second, that there’s still someone who believes that everything in the universe is fine.

   When she gets home in the early morning hours and the city is just waking up around her, she falls asleep with tears burning in her eyes, telling herself that  _nothing lasts forever nothing lasts forever nothing lasts forever_  over and over again until the words blur together in her head.


End file.
